I am a 78-year-old,grandfather of 15, great grandfather of seven, a traditional Catholic now in the Byzantine (Greek) Ukrainian Catholic Church, a former college professor (34 years), Ph.D. in English and Philosophy, academic exile, lousy gardener, lousy fisherman ("Anything worth doing is worth doing badly"--G.K. Chesterton). Pilgrim, peasant, and hermit at heart.

Tuesday, June 14, 2016

The review below was written in
1979. Young readers today may have
difficulty recognizing many in the cast of characters, but I hope they will see
that the nightmare of the present time has been with us for a long time, and
the issues of our day are monstrous, putrid blossoms from sick seeds sown long
ago. Our Lady, pray for us!

Dark Night, Black Hopes

The Death of Christian Culture, by John Senior. Arlington House, Publishers:
165 Huguenot St., New Rochelle, N.Y. 10801. $10.00.

Reviewed by Dr. R.
Kenton Craven

The last year has
brought us a number of books that ought to serve as town criers to the West.
While we have had a veritable tradition of such warnings throughout the
modernist era--Chesterton, Benda, Ortega, Eliot, Tate, Voegelin, Burnham, et
al.—I don't believe that there has been a time since the Thirties in which
alarums have been sounded more insistently or in such happy profusion. The
recent crop, taken together, is reminiscent of the coalition that formed the American Review (1933-37); it includes
the subject of this review, John Senior's The
Death of Christian Culture; Jacques Ellul, Betrayal of the West (Seabury,1978); Arianna Stassinopoulos, After Reason (Stein & Day, 1978);
Joan Colebrook, Innocents of the West:
Travels Through the Sixties (Basic Books, Inc., 1979); and Russell Kirk, Decadence and Renewal in the Higher Learning
(Gateway, 1979). The points of view differ greatly. Senior is a Catholic with medieval
foundations, Ellul a Calvinist, and so forth, but each has glimpsed the future that
is already here, and seen its desolation of spirit, and each calls for a return
to the values of the West.

Ordinarily,
such a statement might seem jejune, to be marked by the teacher as
"generalization! which West?" But the point is that in these
extraordinary times, when the threat is to the very existence of the West, with
all its inner contradictions, the crisis must be stated in Tolkien's terms: the
Men of the West v. Eastern Mordor. Though he disagrees with them radically,
Senior can find Hume and Voltaire closer to his basic assumptions than Kung or
Russell. The question is, can the West survive? Have we gone so far that we
cannot return? In To Jerusalem and Back,
Saul Bellow wondered whether we do not all "go about lightly
chloroformed," while a "dark power" enslaves our thinking. This
loss of perception of what we are now in relation to what we have been
exercises the wits of each of the authors, and summons apocalyptic moods and
rhetoric. Belloc had laid it down that "Europe is the Faith, the Faith is
Europe." The New Humanists were willing to reform the proposition to
"the West is a set of moral standards and limitations," though they
were mightily_ excoriated by the late Allen Tate for this reduction. But even
this rarefied formula has become increasingly repugnant or incomprehensible
before the triumph of a night-marish modernism which seems, as both Senior 'and
Ellul observe, to have seized the minds of even the· best thinkers with a
perversity that looks upon everything Western as outmoded and discredited.
Colebrook and Stassinopoulos join Senior and Ellul in wondering at what James
Burnham called "the suicide of the West,” while Kirk drolly reviews the
self-destruction of the intellect in a disintegrating culture.

It is
against this background that Senior writes, his academic concerns at one with
his life as a teacher. Since the book first appeared last January, it has been
taken to task by several reviewers, as well as some readers, for what is
perceived as a difficult, annoying, even perverse style. I confess that I have
not had this problem in reading him, perhaps because I can identify so readily
with the spirit of anger and exasperation which informs his lively prose: daily
in my teaching I encounter the same problem which exercises both his and
Ellul's wrath-a matter-of-fact assumption that "all that" has been
left behind us in the kitchen-midden of the West, that now we are embarked on a
new journey in spaceship Earth, or in in a new lifestyle in the global village
commune, where all the religious, and epistemological assumptions of the past
are obsolete or quaint. Perhaps some of my readers can identify with the urge
to clenched fists and battle cries in the spirit of Roland. In The Way Down and Out, a much earlier
book by Senior, he wrote “perhaps in the end we shall be reduced to a set of
clenched teeth." While no means been so reduced, he has (like Ellul) been
angered, and his prose has an urgency about it born of trying to contend with
epidemic error and general fog. When one is encircled by Dark Riders, it is no
time for the polite nothings of the university presses.

Nevertheless,
Senior's book is not hysterical; quite the contrary, its arguments are cogent
and sound. It is what he has the audacity to say that is unpalatable to
reviewers. He commonly returns us to first principles in the spirit of his
mentors, Belloc, Cardinal Newman, St. Bernard of Clairvaux, Plato. In relation
to the seriously confused ecumenical movement, he offers Aristotle's Principle
of Contradiction; to those hankering after Eastern mysticism, a clear
discussion of the metaphysical opposition of East and West; to those confused
about Church and State in education, a refreshing discussion of the difference
between true and false liberalism. Beginning with a question, "What is
Christian Culture?" Senior examines the idiocies of the current scene for
topsy-turvy revaluations of all values and a perverted sense of compassion, and
begins a contrast which he uses effectively throughout the book, between the
jaded decadence of fashionable thinking and the basic premises of Chris­tian
Western man, grounded in love, work, family. realist metaphysics, prayer, and
God.

Perhaps
the best and most needed section of the argument is the pursuit of the
"modem" at its roots. For Senior, the Modernist movement in literature
and culture begins precisely where it ends—Rimbaud and Baudelaire do not differ
essentially from Ginsberg and Co.—for they commence by rejecting and hating the
West and, with inexorable predictability, proceed to a love of the East which,
as Senior analyzes with skill, is nothing but a love of the nothingness that is
not there. Historically we may observe the accuracy of Senior's thesis, from
Plato's struggle with the sophists to Paul's with the Corinthians to the
romantic's pursuit of the lotus to the streetcorner gurus and befuddled
theologians of the 1970s. What is characteristic of the East is gnosticism, and
disbelief in the concrete individual thing or person, and when the West falters
in its first principles, it opens itself to that invasion of that spirit in every
dimension of its existence—religion, family, art, education, work, language—which
men like Augustine and Voegelin have fought so well. Senior challenges the
comfortable orthodoxies of the "modern tradition," and the scriptures
(Joyce, Proust, Lawrence, Baudelaire, Flaubert, Rimbaud, etc.) on which it
founds its anti-church. We have not seen such literary irreverence since
Chesterton: it is delightful to have it from a professor of classics who knows
the modern world very well indeed.

Senior's attack on the popular
assumptions of the time proceeds through many topics, but his progress is also
a regress—to the first principles of philosophy and the Christian Catholic
Faith, and its greatest exemplification in the medieval period, which he
opposes to the current corruption in the Church as in the "philosophical
imbecility of Hans Kung." The cure for this latterday nonsense Senior sees
as no different, for church or society, from what it has always been when the
Dark Ages threaten—monastic centers of contemplation and education. Drawing on
the basic principles of monastic education, he makes an eloquent plea that
centers based on these principles be at least permitted existence in the modern
university, a gentlemanly allusion to his own embattled Integrated Humanities
Program at the University of Kansas (see Russell Kirk's report in Decadence and Renewal, pp. 325-328). As
for the church, it too must return to its monastic center. In “Dark Night of
the Church,” he remarks that there is little hope for the Visible Church, that
we have no reason now to be Christians except the right ones, the true ground
of hope.

While I agree generally with the
conclusion as with the mood of the argument, I wonder if the bulk of the book
was not written before the accession of John Paul II. As I write, the Pope is
in Poland, that beautiful country that has survived Munich, Yalta, Potsdam.
Addressing his fellow countrymen, John Paul argued that Poland is of the West
because it is Christian, and he called for a reuniting of the Christian West.
Turning from the TV, I found this passage in GK's Weekly, No. 2, March 28, 1925:

Certainly
that nation has proved itself perpetual under conditions when it was thought
that anything would have perished. And if indeed we come to a chaos in which it
seems that everything has perished, if this Semitic sophistry does link up the
Teutons with the Slavonic hordes, if there returns that welter of barbarism
which Europe has often seen, many who do not now understand may find themselves
saying, if only under their breath, "there is always Poland.”

Thus Chesterton.
We may observe that, as far as Poland was concerned, the Germans and Russians
did unite to crush it, and crush it again. To Senior's witty chapter,
"Black is Beautiful," in which black becomes symbolic of the real
thing, we may add the hope of the Black Madonna of Czestochowa. Malachi Martin
has written that the future of the Church is in the East, not in the West,
where Christianity has been trivialized or diluted, to which Senior would, I
believe, reply—“of course, where the West is clearly understood to be on the
front lines, and knows its enemy."

Reprinted with the permission of
Gerald Russello of the University Bookman. Thanks to Robert Craven for computer
assistance in rescuing the text.